You’re aware of how much their late-season tussles mattered in “the mid-90’s.” They’re intent on preserving a tradition that has stood “since 1980.” Florida State didn’t field a team before 1947, the Seminoles didn’t face the Gators before 1958, and Florida finished up the regular season against Miami eleven times in the fourteen years between 1966 and 1979. Lehigh-Lafayette it ain’t.

I don’t buy the premise that playing these games late in the year made them more significant. The ‘Noles have played plenty of early-season and mid-season games against the ’Canes that essentially decided national championships, while the winless Gators’ victory over undefeated No. 16 FSU on October 16, 1971, didn’t mean less in Gainesville just because it occurred two weeks prior to Halloween.

Even if I did accept that premise, though, it’s purely a modern development. If it matters to them to keep it, that’s fine, but it’s not something sacrosanct and inviolable; it’s just a preference, not a defining tradition. So it is with our season-ending game against the Yellow Jackets; it’s a longstanding practice that developed rather late in our gridiron history, and the reasons for continuing that practice have aged poorly now that the two teams no longer are league rivals.

Paul Johnson has spent a great deal of time minimizing the significance of the rivalry now that he has restored the Ramblin’ Wreck as a force in the ACC, and it’s only fair for us to take him at his word. We should get the non-conference contests out of the way early so we can focus on what matters: winning the SEC East.

. . . but you’re right to call it what it is: a “quirk,” nothing more than that.

Your analogy does not withstand scrutiny. To have two testicles is merely to conform to the natural order, but no natural order dictates that SEC contenders give pride of place on their schedules to ACC rivals (or vice versa). In the first 33 seasons in which Georgia fielded a football team, the Red and Black ended the season against Auburn eighteen times, against Alabama four times, against Clemson three times, against the Savannah Athletic Club twice, against Centre twice, against Furman once, against Dartmouth once, against North Carolina once, against Virginia once, and against Georgia Tech not one time.

If we stuck with the order nature dictated from the outset—-which your emphasis upon cajones would require—-we’d have to conclude that ending the season against a Yellowhammer State SEC squad or one of three out-of-state ACC teams has more historical tradition than a local quirk that ceased to have either charm or relevance when Bobby Dodd ceased to be the coach on the sidelines and became instead the name on the stadium.